infinite zestAnd I am friends with a couple of burners who are really nice people. They're the opposite of the Silicon Valley/Trusties that you associate with BM, both working shitty paying jobs so they can spend ,000 to get fucked up in black rock for a week. I always tell them that I'll go, next year.

And two thousand a piece isn't an exaggeration, it's actually probably a low estimate on how much BM costs for a single person if you want to have any fun. Thing is, at least in Portland we have events like Monday Funday (stupid) and Last Thursday (gentrified) which brings out the same crowd, and those are free. There is a curfew but then you just go home or wherever. There's bike jousting, dodgeball, DJs, and a whole bunch of other dumb shit. You can even piss in Modest Mouse's vegetable garden not that I ever did that, and it's free.

misterbunsBurners are pretty harmless and their festival is expensive and irrelevant now, so whatever.

Who are actually more annoying are the smug burning man haters who think they are being interesting and new by whining about people having fun and making stuff.

You sound like old people.

Wait.

You are old people.

EvilHomerJesus, really? k? Is that just for transportation and supplies, or is that like a ticket price/ land rental fee? I've been curious to go one of these years, you know, maybe set up a tent where I can sell pony plushies and reproductions of Thomas Kinkade paintings, but I shan't do this if it costs any more than "free".

EvilHomerActually, Mr Misterbuns, I'm pretty sure Burners count as "old people" more than the rest of us do. That festival's been going for, what? Since the early 90s, late 80s? Some of us weren't even born then, and few if any of us were old enough to hold a blowtorch.

If anything, we're young people bitching about the lameness of mom and dad.

EvilHomerFurthermore, I submit to you that any "young people" currently attending Burning Man, are the cultural and moral equivalents of those young people who attended Woodstocks '94 and '99 (particularly '99).

Discuss.

misterbunsI never hear young people complaining about burning man. it's always thirtysomethings or gen x age people who are way too full of themselves to realize they are actually pretty boring.

this i my point, you talk about burning man as if you've read a wikipedia article.

when i was there ( this was over a decade ago and i was basically a kid) i hung out with a bunch of strippers and east asian gun nuts, that was my experience, and that is nothing like the shit people talk about when they rip on burning man.

as irrelevant as burning man is now, all of its detractors don't really seem to know anything about it which makes them seem more out of touch and lazy.

so i guess what i meant by old. out of touch and really against the idea of people having fun.

good luck with that?

generally hating on people having fun and hurting no one is old people juju no matter how old you are.

wtf is wrong with the kids in the 90's who went to go see jane's addiction and nine inchnails?

do you just hate whatever fun kids can have?

infinite zestThey say it comes to about 2,000 altogether per person. That's 800 for the price and the drugs and other supplies, but mostly drugs. And to them that's well-earned money well-spent. And I forgot to mention that I was kicked out of the Modest Mouse Piss-Vegetable Garden Park for hiding my friend's bottle of wine under my backpack. Fucking bike cops came up and harassed me when there was a guy right behind me with a sign that said he wanted to buy LSD.. about a month ago there was a gang shooting at Last Thursday that left a few people in the hospital and all the crowd cared about is the fact that the goddamn ice cream shop decided to close.. nothing's a utopia but for a lot of people BM is, even if it's only for a week.

DiscordiaI first went to Burning Man in 98 when it was . Now it's like 0. There were a lot less rules then. It's like most things. Start out with mainly folks who can govern themselves. Then you hit a critical mass where you have to govern the folks who can't handle freedom.

I always heard 97 was the year it all when bad. They banned guns after that.

2002 to was the first year of a free ticket and after that I've decided to go only on a comped ticket. That's always best because other then the days off work and gas your cost ##CONTENT##.

Everyone I know is like that. They work gate, commissary or DPW and just fuck with all the stupid rich fucks and hippies while they're there. A friend of mine keeps a army of trailers out in Gerlach that he rents out during the event for 00.

If you want a free Burning Man experience go out to Fourth of Juplaya.

infinite zest400? They told me it was 800.. I guess if you know someone or buy tickets super early just like anything else it's probably cheaper.. and that's more like Coachella or Primavera prices.

Pitchfork was the same way; I went back in 2006 and it was 40 bucks for all 3 days, which still seemed like a lot of money. I got to see Gza do Liquid Swords in its entirity and Sonic Youth do Daydream Nation in the same night. But for the most part I just remember hanging around playing chess and drinking beers with friends I hadn't seen for a long time. So I definitely got my money's worth.. but 400 dollars? Fuck my friends I'm saving my seat in the front row and I won't move, just like a festival-going Harry Truman.

infinite zestAnd the problem is that a lot of jobs don't let you take off time way in advance, especially if you're a non exempt employee, so the ones paying 800 are the ones who deserve the cheap tickets, to Burning Man or anywhere else. Maybe what they should do is adopt a "rush" system: anybody who can prove that they're a student or work in the service or military industry can get a discounted rate as it gets closer to the event time.

I mean, I don't have anything against the Double- and Triple-commas of this world. Maybe you invented the .mp3 and thanks because I use it a lot. But the more BM gets this stigma of just being a rich kids club the less kids like me are going to want to attend, and pretty soon it'll just be a few young CEOs and nothing more.

infinite zestSomeone told me that it's actually pretty easy to get in just by wandering around outside the grounds, like you were doing Ayahuasca and you got lost, stripped yourself naked including your wristband and you're just looking for your friends who are in there somewhere.

So you admit that Burning Man is irrelevant and virtually unknown amongst the younger generation, yet still you persist in using the phrase "old people", as if age is indicative of lameness or being out-of-touch!

Well, yes, I suppose it is. "Old people" are out of touch and do not know how to have fun; that is why "old people" are at Burning Man, paying lots of money to sit in the desert with a herd of wrinkly hipster sourpusses, when they could be paying far less money to watch meth strippers and East Asian midget wrestling at GOTJ.

Try moving to the Bay and living around this all the time. No joke, when they're gone it's pretty sweet. If we could get rid of both them and the tech people it would be a very beautiful ghost town.

infinite zestDid anybody go to GotJ? I had to work and then I broke my foot so getting halfway across the country would've been pretty impossible.. I should've gone when I still lived so close by, but I'm guessing it was less fun back in 2000-2008 than it is now. :(

And while it's true that I could've probably bought a last-minute plane ticket and a ticket to GotJ for less money I'd probably have more fun at BM. And I've known a lot of cool ICP fans just like I've known cool hippies, but I don't really think it'd be the right scene for me. I guess the closest would be Pickathon or the Summer Bummer Festival.. I can go to the latter one for free because I gave them a pinball machine!

infinite zestAlso @Discordia do you remember maybe a couple years ago when they ran an Onion-esque story about the new subway system at BM and everybody believed it was true? That was funny.

Like I said, to each their own. You're goth and I'm not. This is your thing. Do it. Nobody's going to stop you. Just remember to know where your drugs came from. That can be important.

infinite zestI just don't understand how anybody can happily live there anymore, if the whole Haight Ashbury days were to be believed. People up in Portland bitch that a single bedroom or studio is maybe a thousand in the places everybody wants to live in the center of the city, but good luck finding shit for even close to that small a price in Walnut Creek. :/

infinite zestYeah it does sort of have the stench of someone who just moved to Portland and immediately gets on facebook and complains about people moving to Portland.

But it does remind me of New San Francisco a little bit from Mr. Show, and the New KKK on slackers and Seattle: "Build a wall around it, they like it up there." Seems like a better (and possibly non-satirical) approach may just be building a wall around Black Rock City.

I mean, not to trap festival goers, but for people that would rather live there and make a commitment to do so for as long as they wanted, sort of like a retirement home almost. Like, what's going to happen to the hippies in 10-20 years? A retirement home's a total drag to them, whereas most of our grandparents were fine just watching Bob Barker and waiting for their catheter to be changed.

So yeah, I guess what I'm saying is turn Black Rock into a Convalescent Center with lots of drugs that burners can go to and if they don't want to return to normal society, here's some forms to fill out.

1394I like the burning man Trustifarians I know because they let me use their power tools and fancy lathe for free.

infinite zestTrust fund kids know how to use power tools? Well shit, they've got me beat.

Void 71This video is passive-aggressively trolling for a 'first-world problems' tag. The gripes of rich white yuppies who live in rich white cities like San Francisco are first-world problems by default.